There is an unwritten axiom that modern Christian fiction – that is, fiction written and marketed as being by Christians, for Christians, about Christians – is almost invariably poor.
It wasn’t always this way. C.S. Lexis, perhaps the last truly great `Christian’ writer, penned works that pushed the boundaries of what literature could be. With The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and numerous others, Lewis proved that fiction explicitly marketed from the Christian angle could be thought-provoking, engaging, and brilliant.

Lately, that has not been the case. Christian fiction has been dumbed down into tales of evangelical zeal, stories designed solely as propaganda. This is most obviously exemplified by the Left Behind cycle, an undeniably popular fundamentalist post-apocalyptic series of books that are also, all theological arguments aside and based solely on the basic tenets of good story-telling, simply god-awful (pun definitely intended).

Unfortunately, Manitoba writer Paul H. Boge’s novel The Chicago Healer will not do much to dispel this pattern.

The winner of a Castle Quay Books award for Best New Canadian Author, The Chicago Healer centres on Lucas Stephens, a pharmaceutical executive who discovers, after a brutal tenure in a Chinese penitentiary, that he has been given the gift of healing. Quickly becoming a celebrity, he earns at first the contempt, then the wrath of his former employer, as his healings quickly begin to threaten the company’s profit margin.

There’s no denying Boge’s earnestness as a writer. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Boge commits one of the cardinal sins an author can commit: the book is boring. His prose is turgid and uninspired, a dreary and often inept display of an amateur writer with a story to tell, but without the tools to tell it.

The shame of it is, the story itself is very good, if unoriginal. Author Elmore Leonard took time away from his crime-fiction duties many years ago to release Touch, a novel with the same basic premise and themes. The chief difference being, Leonard knows how to tell a story. Where Touch succeeds in its discussion of the theological implications of power and the corruption of the soul, The Chicago Healer fails, mainly due to uninteresting characterizations, flat plotting, and trite moralizations.

There is good literature on these themes and others to be found, but from outside the limited sphere of strictly `Christian entertainment.’ Canadian author Nino Ricci, Jim Crace, and Jose Saramonge have each written absorbing and philosophically involving accounts of the life of Christ. James Morrow has written several theologically fascinating satires in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Stephen King covers many Christian themes in his horror novels.

The Chicago Healer is not the worst thing ever written, it simply isn’t very good. It is the literary equivalent of unflavoured yoghurt; you can eat it, and keep it down, understanding that it’s probably good for you. But afterward, it leaves a sour taste in your mouth, and you end up wishing you had something else to eat instead.